Monday, July 7, 2008

Reverse Customer loyalty

The whole concept of customer loyalty is misplaced , If we say today customer is king then why customer the king should be loyal to something or someone . It should be companies and organizations which should be loyal to customer. It should not be customer loyalty rather it should be company loyalty if I may call it so ( probably a better term would be reverse customer loyalty) . Consider example of iPhone , when new iphone launched customers across globe shown tremendous faith in the company and its product , there were queues for whole night to take first hand set of iphone from the shop , thats great and shows customers were really loyal to apple otherwise for hi tech product people do not show such a faith in early stages as people have shown for iPhone ( normally they wait and watch , have a feel of the product , see how robust it is and purchase only after its been around in the market for some time ) . Result , probably apple broke even within few months as for as iphone is concerned . In return what did apple do to its customer , within months it reduced price of iPhone by 200$ leaving the customers who have been early buyer of the product in distress and frustrated , what did apple do to make sure that those customers who have shown so much loyalty in apple product are farely ? it did not do anything substantial . So here is a case where customer is loyal but is company loyal to its customer...

On the other side is example of tata , a year back tata promised nano , a car with one lac price tag . When it was launched price of many input factors have gone up as good as 15-20 % but during launch Mr Tata said " A Promise is a promise " and kept the price still one lakh even if that meant taking a hit on margins. That is what being loyal to your customer where you consider closely what your cutomer demand and build your product accordingly. CRM is upto some extent helping to serve customer better but I believe it is a good automater of processes and tool for managing customer still it's purpose should not be to ipmprove customer loyalty rather it should be to help oragnizations become more loyal to customers to increase reverse customer loyalty. USAA comes closer to this definition where they use CRM by all means to help customer , they are not bothered that they should sell products which give high margin to them , rather they advise customers something which will be of more value to customers , they use the data not to exploit customers but to serve them and gaurd ther interest .

If still we are talking about customr loyalty then how is it more different then old days of fords and bajaj when customer was supposed to be loyal force fully in absense of enough choices .

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